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What if a few people like Ver or Gavin realized that if Bitcoin ever actually looked like it was going to succeed the banking industry would spend billions of dollars to stamp it out or that rapid adoption could actually be very bad for society and mankind as a whole? In either of these cases, Bitcoin would have to constantly look like it was on the brink of failure even though adoption was increasing. This would serve to slow adoption to a manageable rate as well as keep the corrupt banking and fiat system from bothering to get involved until too late. How would I do this? First, you have to keep the actual conspiracy small otherwise the jig is up. But then how do you get co-conspirators who aren't actually co-conspirators? Make it about something else, a competing client. OK, great. But you really need to stop people from actually wanting the client. How do I do that? Easy, I will make it complete shit and a totally obvious guarantee of failure to anyone technical. Uh oh, they...

What to do if Bitcoin's cryptography seemed like it would be broken in a few years because of quantum computers? Some people said we should upgrade to a quantum proof encryption algorithm but do nothing else, and once the crypto eventually gets broken, anyone with money in non-quantum proof addresses will simply have it stolen, leaving potentially millions of bitcoin in the hands of one thief. Theymos argued that this would be a systemic risk to Bitcoin, and it would be better to give people a few years to send coins to a quantum proof address, and then freeze all unprotected coins assuming they were lost. From the victims perspective this is about the same as having the coins stolen, but it would be far safer for the ecosystem as a whole.

A lot of people struggle to understand bitcoin, because it's "digital", without recognizing the simple fact that nearly all money today is digital. Virtually all of our money today is just numbers stored in a database on someone else's computer. However, there are important distinctions between having your money represented on a computer owned by a bank or stored on a tens of thousands of computers worldwide in a cryptographically secured peer-to-peer network. Your digital money at a bank can be frozen, stolen, blocked, hacked, and devalued. You cannot do anything with your digital money stored at a bank without permission from the bank that controls it and under the scrutiny and whim of the state. Your funds can be blocked, confiscated and, most certainly, tracked and reported to the government. Your digital funds on the blockchain suffer from none of these issues, with the only legitimate concern being that the value can fluctuate substantially on a...